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Risto_Saarelma comments on "NRx" vs. "Prog" Assumptions: Locating the Sources of Disagreement Between Neoreactionaries and Progressives (Part 1) - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (340)
One old commonality is LW's wariness of conventional democracy, emerging from its singularitarian background. The singularitarian worry is that a society of many wholly self-determining agents will end up in a destructive multipolar trap. Bostrom had already published an argument on these lines back in 2004. SIAI/MIRI has always been different from most of the techno-progressivism milieu it's in with by considering extreme technological autonomy as a very probable future existential risk instead of an important political value to fight for.
The neoreaction connection is pretty clear here. Neoreactionaries denounce democracy as a present-day massive coordination failure instead of a future enabler of existential risk, but they're biting the bullet and openly talking about abandoning democracy for a system that could do the sort of global coordination MIRI presents as its endgame.
I always thought it was interesting that SIAI/MIRI seems to have a very libertarian bias in terms of present-day politics, but its endgame puts all power in a singleton, who divides resources according to CEV, weighting each person's preferences equally, i.e. totalitarian communism, which is the diametrical opposite of libertarianism. Not that I'm saying this is a contradiction or hypocrisy, as different situations do require different politics - if anything, it shows a great deal of cognitive flexibility.
I don't really see a contradiction here. The idea is that perfectly rational agents would choose to merge into a singleton that maximizes a combination of their utility functions, instead of wasting resources on competition. CEV is not the only mechanism that can achieve that, also see Carl's paper on superorganisms. Humans can't quite do that yet because we don't have good technologies for cooperation, precommitment or self-modification, and also because we don't have good enough math on bargaining which is necessary for merging.